The Body Is Dying

Blog#165- 7/19/23

THE BODY IS DYING
By Richard Davis

When a body is close to death organs start to fail. The kidneys lose their ability to filter out poisons, the gastrointestinal tract slows and stops moving and processing food, muscles waste away and the brain slips into a stage of fog until the big sleep takes over.

I can’t help but think that there are a lot of comparisons to the way we die and the way in which our planet is decaying and looking more and more like a body nearing death. We look to global warming and blame it for many of the disasters that are unfolding. The warming of the planet is much like a deadly disease that has taken over the body.

When a disease takes hold that has little hope for slowing or stopping the body knows that death is at hand and systems move into a different mode.

Is it possible that our planet knows that it is on a death spiral and that the catastrophes we are experiencing a part of the process of the death of a planet?

There is little evidence that the planet is capable of any meaningful corrective action. The diseases that are killing the planet are man-made for the most part. If not for the way humans have disrespected and trashed the environment, is it not likely that there would be little or no global warming?

Scientists can speculate about the effect humans have had on the planet but for my money we are the only reason that global warming is taking place. Or course there may be forces beyond our little world that we do not understand and it is possible that they have more control than we know. But my little mind cannot conceive of such a possibility.

It is easy to criticize the entire human species, but that is where the blame lies for the decay of the planet. We only need to look around and see what is happening right now in the world. Large portions of the U.S. are being smothered by unrelenting heat waves approaching three weeks.

Floods are devastating California, New York, Vermont and many other states while the entire world is faced with destructive rains on a frequent basis. Tourist sites in Europe are being shut down because of the heat and entire communities in Asia and around the Pacific are losing their waterfront homes because of rising sea levels.

Arctic ice is melting at an unprecedented rate and when that happens sea levels rise. It won’t be long before places such as Manhattan, Boston and Miami lose large portions of their real estate to rising sea levels. I could go on, but most people are aware of all of these changes to life on our planet.

The question is whether or not the disease the planet is being ravaged by can be halted or slowed. When a body reaches a certain point in the disease process it is nearly impossible to stops the progression to death, even in our world of miracle cures and medical advances. Is our planet too far gone?

I think it is. The only way I could envision a reversal (slowing is more likely) of all of the bad things happening to the planet is if half of the world population of humans was suddenly removed from the planet. The disasters that are happening are killing a lot of people, sort of like when white blood cells try to fight off infection, but the numbers are not great enough to make a difference.

I am not saying we should kill people to save the planet, but it does look like the planet is already on an irreversible course that will some day result in the extinction of our species. If that happens the planet might have a chance for healing but the pessimist in me feels it is too late.